“Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he”. Print

Malcolm Tait is an artist based in Addlethorpe, Lincolnshire in the UK. His work is a versatile and eclectic mix of painting, installation and assemblage. This variety stems from his life experience in many occupations which include, publican, mini cab driver, lobster fisherman, factory worker, picture framer, chef. People have always fascinated him, the choices they make, how they come to hold the views they do, what makes them who they are; in this drive to understand others he found he could only honestly know himself, so all his work is in some larger or smaller way autobiographical reflecting his own experience of life. His early paintings are primarily in oils but he now paints primarily in acrylics since resuming his practice after a serious illness (IPF), a lung transplant and recuperation from early 2019 - mid 2020. This episode has led to a sharpening of his focus on what he now creates. Having drawn since he could hold a pencil at the age of four, drawing is an essential element in his practice, the assemblage and making stems from an equally early pleasure of making small clay objects out of mud by a “wee burn” at the age of six in the village of Newcastleton. As well as drawing the other elements central to his practice today are colour and figurative work. As Goethe said colour reveals all of the physical world to us, colour also informs emotional responses garnered from experiences throughout life and how it does those things is a primary concern of his practice. Artists that inform his work in this field are Gerhard Richter, Bridget Reilly, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns to name but a few. His figurative and more traditional landscape work stems from a simple love of recreating what he sees in the world on a two dimensional surface something he has relished all his life and continues to appreciate more and more, now exploring gestural marks and brushstrokes adding emotion and angst to the work. Early inspirations were Rubens, Titian and Goya now a primary driver of this style are the portraits of Alberto Giacometti and the later works of John Bellany. In assemblage and making he explores the meaning that can be located in objects, this meaning gained from narrative, history and learned experience and how the combination of various objects can lead to an expression of something completely unrelated but still relevant to the human experience.